Master of None Season 2 Is Delightful, but Not Deep

We live in an age of arty, digressive television comedy. Thanks, assuredly, to Louis C.K.’s groundbreaking, auteurist FX comedy Louie—which played with narrative and form and mood like perhaps no other half-hour series before it—we’ve lately seen an influx of comedies that rebuff the familiar rhythms of the genre. Without Louie there would probably be no Lena Dunham’sGirls, nor Donald Glover’sAtlanta, nor Pete Holmes’sCrashing. And there would definitely be no Master of None, the lauded Netflix show from Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, whose second season premieres May 12.

Well, maybe it’s not fair to say that these shows wouldn’t exist without Louie. But they would certainly be very different—Master of None especially. Like C.K., Ansari and Yang love a good ramble. They allow asides to turn into entire episodes, experiment with style and aesthetic, often nodding to art-house cinema of old. It’s fun viewing, not knowing where each episode of the series—which is ostensibly about an actor in New York named Dev—is going to take us. On Netflix, a season can play out in one long discursive stream, a pleasant and vaguely sedative experience that is supremely enjoyable—but, I think, also blinds us to some flaws.

What I like about Master of None Season 2 is mostly what I liked about Season 1. Dev is good company, a funny and amiable guy who loves food and culture and conversation. He’s a kind of beta renaissance man, more curious than capable but not a bumbling goof either. In Season 2, we first meet him in Modena, Italy, a small-ish city in the north of the country where Dev has gone to soak up the easy vibes and learn to make pasta. The Italy-set episodes are pretty and airy, one a black-and-white farce, the other a sun-splashed trip to a wedding in a villa with a view. These episodes are laid-back and light on plot, though they do quietly set the stage for what’s to come later in the season.

As the show ambles along back in New York, Dev gets an unexpected new job hosting a food competition show and tries to sort out his romantic life. There are a few stand-alone episodes dealing with religion and family and dating apps, a particular highlight being “Thanksgiving,” in which Dev takes a backseat to Lena Waithe’s Denise, whose struggles in coming out to her mom (a terrific Angela Bassett) are chronicled with grace and subtlety. Master of None is best when it’s lightly musing on a particular topic—nothing goes too deep or offers up any true profundity, but Ansari and Yang manage to grapple with well-worn themes in clever, offbeat ways. Ansari and Yang are enjoying the freedom that Netflix allows, which makes for interesting, agreeable television.

But a season of narrative television should, at least in some sense, tell a larger story. Master of None’s second season does that in fits and starts, chiefly focusing on lovelorn Dev as he pursues a relationship that can probably never come to be. See, he met a fantastic woman in Italy, smart and funny Francesca (played with abundant charm by Alessandra Mastronardi)—but she’s committed to someone else, and, y’know, lives in Italy. Dev pines away nonetheless, especially after Francesca comes to visit and they spend some chatty, happy hours wandering the city. This story of obstacles and setbacks and unspoken longing is a familiar one, and while Master of None retells it stylishly, it’s still the same old story. I’m just not sure the show knows that.

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There’s a lot in Master of None that feels fresh and innovative because it looks so good, and is staged in quirky, scattershot fashion. But any further investigation into what the show has to say about love and romance reveals that its insights are often surprisingly trite. An episode like “Religion,” in which Dev and a cousin work through their views on the Muslim faith they were raised in, is exciting and vivid, a dialogue that we don’t often see play out on television, especially in comedy form. So too with “Thanksgiving,” which deals with queerness and race from a largely unexplored angle. But those are one-off episodes—the major threads of the season are Dev and Francesca’s courtship and the pitfalls of showbiz, as Dev’s star gradually rises inch by inch. Which is all fun to watch! It just doesn’t resonate with the vital individuality that the show’s alluring, idiosyncratic aesthetic suggests. Master of None can sometimes hide a shallowness behind all its style, which keeps the show from achieving the searching, aching power of Louie at its best.

Which was maybe never Master of None’s intent. Quite unlike the sad, dyspeptic hero of Louie, Dev is warm and ebullient, a life enthusiast who is eager for new experience rather than suspicious of it. So perhaps it’s perfectly in step with the show’s mission that Dev’s romantic and professional mishaps are less than substantial, that they plug neatly and gamely into hoary formulas. It might be enough that there are such blissfully winning moments as Dev and Francesca exploring the autumnal beauty of Storm King together, or excitedly wandering around a Duane Reade. Maybe the fact that a Muslim-born Indian-American gets to be the centerpiece of all this dreamy, Woody Allen-ish sparkle is the point. I’m perfectly happy to embrace the show on those terms, and indeed did devour the entire season in one day, with relish. But this gorgeously presented meal did, in the end, leave me feeling a little hungry.

Still, Season 2 advances on Season 1’s promise, so perhaps Season 3 (if it happens at all) is when the show’s inventive flair will fully eschew the derivative stuff—and the series will finally realize the full brightness of its potential. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to watch Dev and friends talk and travel and eat delicious food. It’s a good time—even if it doesn’t yet achieve great things.